[HOWTO] QuickTip: Change the image for the cap on KDE4′s desktop cube

KDE4 is known partly for it’s lovely eye candy, and one of the things former GNOME users love is the ability to have a desktop cube like you can have in Compiz. The one problem is that while you can change the background image (like Compiz’s skydome) you can’t change the image use for the top and bottom of the cube.

Except that’s not entirely accurate,it turns out. I did some searching to see if I could find any way to replace the image and I found two different sites with the information I needed, one in Italian and one in English. Here are the steps you need  to follow.

• Open your favorite image editor and create or resize an image so that it measures 800×800 pixels. Make sure the image has a transparent layer . In Gimp you want to use Layer > Translucency > Add Alpha Channel. Save the file with the name cubecap.png.
• Copy the file to /usr/share/kde4/apps/kwin, replacing the image already there. I strongly recommend making a copy of the current cubecap.png so you have it in the event you want to get back to the default.
• Open the Desktop Effects settings, select the Desktop Cube effect and open the configuration window by clicking on the wrench button. Go to the Advanced tab and clear the checkbox for Display image on caps, then then check it again. Click on OK to close out the settings dialog.
• Hit the key combination for using the desktop cube, Ctrl-F11is the default, and drag your cube down to show the cube cap. Voilà! If you did everything correctly you will see your new cube cap.

You will have the same image on the top and bottom of your cube, and unlike with Compiz there’s no way to use different images for the top and bottom of your cube, but at least you can change the image you use for your cube cap.

If you use a desktop sphere rather than a cube you can see KRAM’s post on the PC Pitstop Forums for information on not only how to change your car but also how to fit your image for the desktop sphere.

Thanks to KRAM for the English language instructions and to NiCo on the Mandriva International Backups forum for the Italian version of the instructions. that first showed me the change was possible.

[HOWTO] Preview your Plymouth themes without rebooting

I was doing a search to try to figure out why my Kmint theme for Plymouth won’t work properly and I found a couple of really nice tools. The first is a sunrise theme plus an app called EZSwitch that lets you change your Plymouth them via a GUI. The second is a way to actually preview your Plymouth theme so you can see if it works without having to reboot your computer. It’s part of a Plymouth theming guide out together by Charlie Brej. In the first post of that series he gave instructions for viewing your current Plymouth theme. You could run these three commands:

• Open a terminal as root, and run plymouthd to start the Plymouth deamon
• Show the current splash by running plymouth --show-splash
• Quit the demo by running plymouth quit

I say you could run those commands but I recommend against doing that because once I had the daemon start showing the splash I found that I got locked out of my system while the splash screen ran. I don’t know how long it was going to take, or even that it was waiting for a command to finish, and had to force a reboot to get control of my system back, Luckily there’s an even better way to preview the splash screen. Open a terminal and get full root access by running su and entering your password. Be very careful what commands you run as root. You could mess up your system with the wrong command and not even know it until it’s too late.

Once you’ve gotten root access in your terminal run this longer command:

plymouthd; plymouth --show-splash ; for ((I=0; I<10; I++)); do plymouth --update=test$I ; sleep 1; done; plymouth quit

That command starts the Plymouth daemon, shows the current active splash screen, and quits.

Want to look at a different Plymouth theme? You can fire up EZSwitch if you have it installed or else run this in a terminal as root:

plymouth-set-default-theme --list

You should have a number of themes installed on your system. To pick a different theme replace --list with the theme name. For example, you can select the solar theme you would run

plymouth-set-default-theme solar

As always, when you changing your Plymouth theme you need to make sure your system by running

update-initramfs -u && sudo update-grub

Now you’re ready to preview the theme by running

plymouthd; plymouth --show-splash ; for ((I=0; I<10; I++)); do plymouth --update=test$I ; sleep 1; done; plymouth quit

Big thanks to Charlie Brej for writing his Plymouth theming guide.

[RESOLVED] Can someone help diagnose my Plymouth bootsplash issue?

Update 27 Nov 9:40a ET: I found a solution to my issue on the Linux Mint Forums. It turns out the instructions I read on the KDE-Looks page for Kmint seem to be missing some important steps. I’ve added them at the bottom of this post.

I got tired of the scrolling text boot on my LMDE laptop and installed Plymouth, but it’s looking pretty funky to me. I had been using the Kmint Plymouth bootsplash theme but it’s showing up as blank except for the progress bar on the bottom left of the screen and distro information (that isn’t even completely accurate) on the lower right. I switched to the solar theme from the package plymouth-themes-all but the same thing happened. I shot this video to show what I’m getting.

Sorry about the video quality and the lack of audio, but that’s what I got on my Samsung Restore (on Virgin Mobile). As the video shows I get the progress bar at the lower left corner, and other than the progressing bar I get the Debian version info on the lower right but nothing else until my Ksplash kicks in. Does anyone know what I may be doing wrong? If anyone needs more info just ask in the comments and I’ll add it to the post.

Oops! After posting this I remembered I took some screenshots that may help show the issue.  These two pics show the Kmint Plymouth theme.

I got it resolved, and here are the steps I hadn’t known about:

Install instructions

1) Install plymouth

sudo apt-get install plymouth plymouth-drm

2) Download and untar file [for LifeInTheGrey's Plymouth theme, on his original post of the thread linked above]

Download the attached zip file and expand it to /usr/share/plymouth/themes/

3) Set the theme

sudo plymouth-set-default-theme lmde

4) Modify grub to see the splash

gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub

Change:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet"
to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

5) Update initramfs and grub

sudo update-initramfs -u && sudo update-grub

Bam, you’re good to go! 

You may need to restart a couple of times to get the changes registered. It took me two reboots to see the bootsplash. I’m changing my Plymouth theme one more time to get the Kmint theme enabled and I’ll snag a screenshot to show how it looks for me.  Here’s my Plymouth with a modified Kmint. I added a background while trying to get the issue resolved so it will look different from what’s on your system.

I’m not sure why I can’t get the statusbar, so I’ll have to dig some more. Here’s the lmde Plymouth theme, complete with the statusbar. I’ll be using it as my reference as I try to ID my last issues with the Kmint them. I will be passing my findings along to hellokitten, the dev of the Kmint theme.

Yoooouge thanks to LifeInTheGrey for the missing info.

[HOWTO] QuickTip: Install packages graphically on LMDE running KDE

Just a quick post to pass something along I just discovered. When I got my laptop with LMDE on it I had no problem double-clicking on Debian packages I had snagged and having Gdebi launch so I could install them, but the moment I installed KDE I lost that ability and couldn’t figure out how to get it back. Yes, I know I could install packages from the command line with a simple sudo dpkg -i [package name], but that’s a bit of a pain in the rear for someone who prefers to use GUIs for things whenever he can.

This morning I was checking out the latest post on Linux Mint 12 on the Mint blog and I noticed that “packages now open with gdebi” and just on a whim I fired up the Software manager and did a search for “gdebi.” Sure enough, I found gdebi-kde, and installed it, then I checked my theory by double clicking on a package I had installed. As I hoped, Gdebi opened in a window and asked me if I wanted to install the packge.

I’m a happy penguinista.

[HOWTO] How to fix the broken spellchecker in LMDE’s LibreOffice

I’m using LibreOffice’s word processor to work on some translations for an open source project and I noticed that the spelling and grammar checker checker tool didn’t seem to work. I looked through all of the LibreOffice packages available for Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) and couldn’t see what package I was missing so I did a Google search and saw mentions on several sites (sorry, I can’t find the sites in my history) about separate spell checkers not being installed.

This seemed odd, because I am able to check the spelling in other apps, from Chromium to even Dolphin, KDE’s file manager. I fired up my software manager again and saw that neither aspell nor hunspell were installed so I installed aspell and sure enough, the spelling and grammar checker in LibreOffice was finally working.

It turns out this is a frequent issue, and I suspect it shows up on other distros as well. I definitely saw it reported on Ubuntu and the Ubuntu-based flavors of Linux Mint. I was finally able to find Bug #836475: Spell checking does not work in LibreOffice and I posted a comment about the apparent missing dependency.

[HOWTO] Automate adding your favorite sayings to the Fortune plasmoid

Last year I wrote a tutorial for adding quotes and sayings to KDE’s Fortune plasmoid. Now that I’ve got a new laptop I am adding new quotations to my Fortunes list almost daily thanks mainly to daily emails from the website The Quotations Page. This can actually be a bit of a problem since I have to manually copy the updated myfortunes file to /usr/share/games/fortunes/ and then run a pair of commands to make the updates available to the plasmoid itself.

Last week I ended up writing a BASH script to automate the update procedure, and now that I’ve confirmed it works perfectly I’ll share my script. To use my BASH script create a blank text file in your Home directory called update_fortunes.sh, and open it in your favorite text editor. Copy the following lines of code and paste it into the file:

echo "Copying myfortunes to Fortunes folder"
sudo rm /usr/share/games/fortunes/myfortunes
sudo cp /home/[MYUSERNAME]/myfortunes /usr/share/games/fortunes/myfortunes
echo ""
echo "Updating available fortunes list"
sudo strfile /usr/share/games/fortunes/myfortunes
sudo /usr/games/fortune -f

The script does a few simple things and I’ll explain what each line does.

• The first line simply prints a message in your terminal letting you know it’s copying your personal myfortunes file to the main Fortunes data directory.
• The next line removes the current copy of myfortunes in the fortunes data directory to prevent any confusion for Fortunes as it reads your file. If your personal Fortunes file is called something other than myfortunes you’ll need to change the script accordingly. When the script gets to this point it will ask for your administrator password. Without your password it won’t be able to do several stages of the script.
• The next line copies myfortunes from your Home directory (the one that you have manually edited to include the new quotations and phrases) into the Fortunes data folder. Make sure you change [MYUSERNAME] to the username used on your system and the filename matches what your Fortunes file .
• The echo "" simply prints a blank line in your terminal to make the output from the script easier to read.
• The next line prints a message in your terminal to let you know that the script is processing myfortunes so the plasmoid can read the updated quotation list. When it’s done you will see  a message that says something like
  

  "/usr/share/games/fortunes/myfortunes.dat" created
There were 347 strings
Longest string: 309 bytes
Shortest string: 41 bytes

• The last line will check all of your Fortunes data files and let you know the overall percentage of entries are in each data file

Save the BASH script and make sure it is executable by running the following in a terminal window:

chmod +rx scriptname

That will let anyone who uses your computer read and run the script. If you want to be the only one who can run the script run this in your terminal:

chmod u+rx scriptname

If you didn’t get an error it’s time to give the script a test run to make sure everything’s right. In your terminal window run ./myfortunes.sh to run the script. Here’s what I get when I run it.

~ $ sudo /usr/games/fortune -f
100.00% /usr/share/games/fortunes
     4.00% work
     0.27% debian-hints
     0.81% riddles
     1.32% drugs
     0.33% pets
     1.29% education
     0.46% paradoxum
     3.96% science
     1.30% law
     3.43% knghtbrd
     0.93% sports
     0.34% goedel
     2.95% art
     0.88% husse-helping
     0.19% magic
     4.13% miscellaneous
     0.95% kids
     3.17% platitudes
     7.63% definitions
     4.57% songs-poems
     2.68% wisdom
     0.54% debian
     1.66% literature
     1.26% food
     0.47% medicine
     2.20% myfortunes
     0.14% husse-moderating
     0.11% husse-funny
     0.06% ascii-art
     1.73% perl
     0.65% linuxcookie
     0.95% love
     0.34% news
     2.73% fortunes
     7.89% people
     1.80% disclaimer
     2.13% linux
     7.19% cookie
     3.48% zippy
     1.02% ethnic
     0.52% tao
     6.55% computers
     1.44% startrek
     1.25% humorists
     0.08% translate-me
     4.45% politics
     3.69% men-women
     0.08% husse-self
~ $

Of course your list of Fortunes data files may have more or less than mine, according to which Fortunes data files you have installed on your system. When you see something like this you’ll know that the Fortunes plasmoid sees all of your quotations and phrases and is ready to display them all as they come up in the random selection. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to leave them in the Comments section and I’ll be glad to help in any way I can.

Two specials in my Penguin Gear shop until Thanksgiving

As much as I hate retailers who start pushing Chrismukkuh specials before Thanksgiving, my online T-shirt partner has a pair of specials that run from now until Thanksgiving Day that I think y’all will want to take advantage of to help with your Chrismukkuh shopping.

We’ll start with a great multiples special. Buy any four items in the store, mix and match, and get a fifth item FREE! It’s good on everything in my store, including some products I’m hoping to add in the next week. Just use coupon code XMAS5FOR4 when you checkout to get the free item.

Don’t see four items you want? Pick 3 or more items and you can get FREE STANDARD SHIPPING up to $9.50. Use coupon code BUY3SHIP when you check out to get the fee shipping.

I’m sorry, but you can’t get both discounts in the same order, but either deal comes with Spreadshirt’s excellent quality and service. As always your order will be printed when you order it and most orders are shipped within 48 hours of your order being placed.

These specials are valid form now to Thanksgiving Day, 24 November 2011. Will there be specials next month? There might be, but I haven’t heard about any from Spreadshirt yet. I hope you won’t choose to wait for another special and miss out on what could be your best deals on everything in the Penguin Gear store.

Two missing plasmoids have been found

With my move to KDE on top of LMDE there were some plasmoids that have gone missing, but today I found two of them.

I initially had the QuickAccess plasmoid when I installed KDE but something happened and it disappeared on me, but after some incessant searching today I tracked down the QuickAccess for KDE SC 4.5+ over at KDE-Apps.org. Now I can reduce how much room my Folder View plasmoid takes up on my desktop, and I may even get rid of it completely. I really prefer using QuickAccess anyway to get at files in my Desktop folder, like the playlist file for listening to the WBUR live stream.

You’ll need to install QuickAccess from source code so once you have the download extracted you will need to meet a pair of dependencies. From your favorite package manager install kdelibs5-dev and libconq5-dev, and if you want to install them from the command line run kdesudo apt-get install kdelibs5-dev libconq5-dev. You should probably run that from the folder you extracted 98838-fortunoid0.2.1.tar.gz into. Then run these commands one line at a time:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=`kde4-config --prefix` ..
make
sudo make install
kbuildsycoca4

Once KDE realizes it’s installed you can install it the regular way.

I had also had a version of the Fortune plasmoid that appeared on a plain widget background rather than the chalkboard background this one has. This plasmoid isn’t bad, but I really prefer the cleaner background. After finding the QuickAccess plasmoid on KDE-Apps I did a search there for my old Fortune plasmoid and was happy to find the fortunoid plasmoid, complete with the clean background.

To install fortunoid make sure you have the fortunes package installed, the open a terminal window in the directory and run the same list of commands for installing QuickAccess, but you can skip creating the build directory since it’s already there. The page for fortunoid has a different list of steps but I hadn’t seen them when I installed it and didn’t have any problems with the install.

With the exception of a Google Gadget or two that I can’t get running yet my desktop looks a little more like I want it.

Clean

Dirty

I’ve tweaked the desktop theme again, and everything is from the BlueSora theme except for the Panel background, Analog Clock and Shutdown Dialog, which are all from the Air theme.

 

Presenting… Kathryn!

[Updated 7 Nov: Whoops! I forgot to include the preliminary screenshot I had taken specifically for this post. It's been added below. -Peng]

I mentioned earlier this year that my desktop computer finally died of old age and since I couldn’t afford a new one I’d be doing all of my computing work either from a borrowed computer or (my preferred method) working on a borrowed computer running Linux Mint 10 KDE from a LiveUSB. (A LiveUSB is a typical flash drive but with the disk image for an operating system set up to run the desired OS without installing anything to the computer’s hard drive. A LiveUSB is a cousin of the LiveCD or LiveDVD, the normal method for sharing Linux distributions.)

During the summer a member of the Linux community realized I didn’t have a computer anymore and offered to send me one. I won’t identify the person even by the part of the Linux community we know each other through, but he is one amazing Penguinista. I explained that I’d need any computer to be a laptop due to space limitations and they said they have access to computers being replaced and otherwise discarded. It ended up taking a little longer than they expected but on Wednesday, 19 October a box arrived via UPS, my new (to me) laptop computer. I assumed it would be an older, fairly underpowered laptop that may be on the older side of chronological age but would let me once again have a laptop computer to use to do anything and (almost) everything I need to do with a computer, and just having a laptop at all would be a lot better than having to snag time on a friend’s computer.

I wasn’t prepared for what was inside the box, a Levono ThinkPad with a dual core Intel Centrino vPro CPU, 3.81 GB of RAM, a 149 GB hard drive and a 14.1″ widescreen display. This alone makes it the best computer I’ve ever owned but it also has built-in WiFi and Bluetooth. Hokey smokes, Bullwinkle! My friends who helped me get my old computer are now jealous because my new (to me) laptop is actually better than either of their desktop computers, both of which were bought earlier this year.

The laptop came with Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) installed so I had to decide if I wanted to try to install KDE on top of the GNOME-based system it came with or blow it all away and just install Mint 10 KDE. In the end I liked KDE on top of LMDE so I stuck with KDE on top of LMDE. The devs at Linux Mint are moving from using Kubuntu as the basis for Linux Mint KDE to using LMDE as the base so I guess I have a head start on it, although I’d love to be able to use a newer version of KDE than 4.6.5. Some of the apps also seem to be older versions, like the Amarok media player being version 2.4.3 when I know that Amarok 3 has been out a while.

One thing’s for sure, I’ve had to get used to the keyboard’s layout. The numeric keypad is embedded within the QWERTY keyboard layout, as is the norm for laptops, and I keep forgetting the Esc key is above F1 rather than to the left of it. The result of that is I keep meaning to hit F2 but I hit F3 because I forget that the Esc key is one level of keys higher. The dual “mouse” systems has also confused me a bit. I find I completely ignore the TrackPoint “eraser” mouse and use the touch pad as a mouse, although more often than not I plug in a regular USB rodent and use that. (I’ve since gone into the system BIOS and disabled the TrackPoint completely.) I guess I’m just too used to having a physical mouse to grab when I want to move the cursor, although if I’m in a typing-intense task like editing tags on a folder of audio files I tend to just use the touch pad so I can keep my hands closer to the keyboard. I was able to tweak the touch pad settings withkde-config-touchpad, which I found doing a search in LMDE’s Software Manager, but I wish I could figure out what I do from time to time to effect a scrollwheel without using the regular mouse. There’s got to be a way to do it since I’ve noticed a window scroll or a window go to window-shade move when I didn’t knowingly do anything to trigger the action.

The laptop’s more of a business machine than a gaming machine and I’m wishing I could do something about the drivers for the nVidia G84M [Quadro NVS 140M] graphics device. When I tried to enable some of the fancier desktop effects like Cover View and some of the Desktop Cube effects I get an error saying the effects could not be activated. I said “tried” there because as I wrote earlier today I was finally able to get the Nvidia drivers installed and can use the full range of desktop effects, including the 3D Cube.

On the software side of what I’m running pretty much the apps I was running before, although I haven’t been able to get a pair of apps that require 32-bit libraries installed yet, Mobile Media Converter and the Amazon MP3 Downloader. I know there’s a way to get around the requirement for Amazon’s app but I haven’t had a chance to apply it to Kathryn yet. I’m also unable to install Quanta+, the HTML development app I used to run on my old system but now I get the bad news that it needs to be built for KDE4. I also used to run a Fortunes plasmoid on my old system but when I run it now I see it’s on a background that looks like a school chalkboard rather than the plain widget background I used to be able to use. I’m also having issues using Google Gadgets like the WeatherBug Sidebar Gadget because whenever I try to add a Google Gadget the app fails. I was able to get it installed but when I try to run it the plasma desktop crashes, and when I get the desktop back I can see the widget but I can’t configure it. It’s a real shame because the Bug is my favorite weather app, hands down.

Now that I pretty much have my system like I want it I’ve made a pair of screenshots, one of just the desktop and one with a few apps open to let you see the overall look.

Clean

The widgets you see are Folder View, Notes, Phtoto of the Day, Analog Clock, Hardware Temperature Sensors and Network Monitor. My desktop theme is a mashup of a few themes, primarily the BlueSora theme. (I miss the Blend theme I used on Mint 10 KDE.)  The feline is Mal, our new kitteh named after our favorite Browncoat, Malcolm Reynolds. He joined our abode lat Monday when Tom found him shivering out on the street scared of everything, and we brought him in while we try to find his people. Since then little Mal’s won our hearts over despite the fact that he aims to misbehave every now and then, and it looks like Mal has found his new forever home. (You can find more pictures of Mal on my Facebook page, and I’m thinking of making some videos of him if I can get some decent quality video out of my phone’s camera.)

Dirty

If you guys (and gals) have any questions please feel free to leave them in the Comments section.

Holy crap! What happened to my fonts?

When I installed KDE on my new laptop (I promise I’ll try to get my review posted before the day’s up) I tried to enable my normal collection of KDE Desktop Effects but I kept getting complaints that some of the effects that require compositing couldn’t be enabled because of an issue with OpenGL support, and I was able to track down the instructions for installing the Nvidia drivers for my Quadro NVS 140M graphics chip. Except when I enabled the new drivers and did a reboot everything was HUGE!

I tried to find what may have gone wrong and ended up posting a question about it to the Linux Mint Forums. Mint Forums user Anakinholland was kind enough to give me a link to this thread over at Linux Questions. It turns out that my problem is a common issue and I needed to change my Dots Per inch (DPI) setting. I did some more searching online  to try to verify the information I was getting and came across a post on Yet Another Linux Blog that suggested I run a pair of commands in a terminal. When I did I got this:

$ xdpyinfo | grep dimension
  dimensions:    1440x900 pixels (302x191 millimeters)
$ xdpyinfo | grep resolution
  resolution:    121x120 dots per inch
$

I fired up Kate to edit the xorg configuration file with kdesudo kate /etc/X11/xorg.conf and added these two lines at the bottom of the “Monitor section:

    Option         "UseEdidDpi" "FALSE"
    Option         "DPI" "100 x 100"

After saving the changes and rebooted my system I was thrilled to find what I had been looking for.

That looks like what the doctor ordered. Running those two lines in Konsole again returned these results:

$ xdpyinfo | grep dimension
  dimensions:    1440x900 pixels (366x229 millimeters)
$ xdpyinfo | grep resolution
  resolution:    100x100 dots per inch
$

Yooouge thanks to Anakinholland for responding so quickly, and with just what I was looking for. It’s support from fellow users like this that helps make me thrilled to use Linux, and the good users of Linux Mint are even better at this than the folks over at Ubuntu are, and they were pretty good when I was using that distro.